THE SAINT BARTHOLOMEW DAY MASSACRE

-August 24, 1572 --France

Catherine de Medici has artfully contrived a marriage between her daughter Margaret and Henry of Bearne, king of Navarre, chief of the Huguenots. Henry’s mother, Jeanne D’Albret, and Admiral Coligny concur with the union hoping it will put an end to the feuds existing between the rival Protestant and Catholic parties. Since the Pope has refused to grant the necessary dispensation to enable the marriage to be celebrated, the queen mother has caused a dispensation to be forged in the name of the Pope.

All Catherine anticipated, the heads of the Reformed party, believing the marriage to be an important step towards national reconciliation, have resorted to Paris in large numbers. Admiral Coligny and his family are among those present, and though urged by some of the Huguenot chiefs to quit Paris for fear of his safety, he believes in the friendship, not knowing it is fraud.

On August 18, the marriage was celebrated in the cathedral church of Notre Dame, and with the succeeding feasts and gaieties, the fears of the Huguenots are completely disarmed.

The day following the marriage, on August 19, a secret council is held in which it is determined to proclaim a general massacre of the Huguenots. The King is now willing to give 50,000 crowns for the assassination of the Admiral and Maurevel, the king’s assassin is sent for and invited to murder the Protestant leader.

On the 22nd of August, Maurevel lies in a house situated near the church of Saint Germain L’Auxerrois, between the Louvre and the Rue Bethisy. As the Admiral passes, Maurevel fires and wounds him the hand. Coligny succeeds in reaching his hotel where he is attended by Ambrose Pare, who performs a painful operation.

Maurevel, though he failed, was rewarded 2000 crowns from the king, who in the meantime visits the wounded man at his hotel, and professes the greatest horror and vowing vengeance against the would-be assassin.

The Queen mother has fixed this day, August 24, for the massacre of the French Protestants. This morning between two and three o’clock, as the king sits in his chamber with his mother, and the Duke of Anjou, the great bell of the church of Saint Auxerrois rings to early prayer.

It is the arranged signal for the massacre to begin! Immediately, the first pistol shot is heard. Three hundred of the royal guard who have been held in readiness this night rush out into the streets shouting, "For God and the King." They wear a white sash on the left arm, and a white cross on their hats.

Before leaving the palace, a party of the guard murders the retinue of the young King of Navarre, the guests of Charles IX in the Louvre. One by one, they are called by name from their rooms, marched down unarmed into the quadrangle, and are hewed down before the eyes of the royal host.

At the same time, Le Charron, provost of the merchants, and Mariel, his ancient friend, having mustered a large number of desperadoes who have been previously assigned respective quarters are now to be seen hastening to enter upon their frightful morning’s work; while the Duke of Guise determines to he the one to complete the murder of Coligny, and thus hasten to his hotel.

The Dukes party bursts in the outer door; and the Admiral is roused from his sleep by shots fired at his followers in the courtyard below. Rising from his couch, but scarcely able to stand, he flees to an upper chamber, only to be tracked by his assassins who stab him to death as he stands leaning against the wall. His body is then thrown out of the window into the courtyard below. The Duke waiting impatiently hurries up to the body, and wiping the blood from the Admirals face says, "I know him --it is he!" then spurning the body with his foot calls out, "Courage, comrades, we have begun well, now for the rest; the king commands it." They then rush into the street.

Firing can now be heard in every quarter throughout Paris. The houses of the Huguenots have previously been marked and are now broken into, and men, women, including children are sabred or shot down. It is no use trying to flee. The would-be fugitives are slaughtered in the streets. Even the king has seized his arquebus and securely fires upon his subjects from the windows of the Louvre.

The massacre will continue three days. Corpses block doorways; mutilated bodies lie in every lane, while thousands are cast into the Seine River now swollen by a flood.

Similar massacres immediately follow all over France. Between fifteen and eighteen hundred persons will be killed at Lyons and those who dwell along the Rhone River below that city will be horrified by the sight of the dead bodies floating down the river. Six hundred will be killed at Rouen and many more at Dieppe and Havre.

Sully will estimate the entire number massacred at 70,000, but other writers will estimate the victims at 100,000. Catherine will write Phillip II of the three days of massacre at Paris, who, when he reads of it, will be said to laugh for the first and only time in his life. Rome will be beside herself with joy: the cannon will be fired at St. Angelo, while Gregory XIII and his cardinals will walk in procession from sanctuary to sanctuary to give God thanks for the massacre.

When the French ambassador, La Mothe Fenelon, first appears at the English court following the massacre, Queen Elizabeth refuses to see him for several days. At length admitting him to an audience, the lords and ladies receive him in profound silence. They are dressed in deep mourning. They do not deign to salute or even to look at the ambassador. The Queen receives him with a severe and mournful countenance. Stammering out his apology that he blushes to bear the name of "Frenchman", he hastens from her presence.

Not all of Admiral Coligny’s family is destroyed: a surviving daughter will marry William Prince of Orange, who, like his father-in-law, will be assassinated for his Protestant defense. William will be murdered in 1585 by Balthazar Gerard and will expire in the arms of his wife.

As for the wretched, king of France, the terrible crime to which he has been a party will bear upon his mind to the last. The recollection of the scenes of the massacre will constantly haunt him, and he will become restless, haggard, and miserable. He will see his murdered guests sitting by his bedside and at his table. "Ambrose," he will say to his confidential physician, "I know not what has happened to me these two or three days past, but I feel my mind and body at enmity with each other as if I was seized with a fever. Sleeping or waking, the murdered Huguenots seem ever present to my eyes, with ghastly faces, and weltering in blood. I wish the innocent and helpless had been spared." He will die in tortures of mind impossible to be described --attended in his last moments, strange to say, by Ambrose Pare, who is a Huguenot physician, and a Huguenot nurse. One of the worst horrors that will haunt him wi11 be that his own mother is causing his death by slow poisoning, an art in which he knew that great woman to be fearfully accomplished.

The Catholic Chateaubriand lamented, "The execrable day of Saint Bartholomew only made martyrs; it gave to philosophical ideas an advantage over religious ideas which has never since been lost."

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August 15, 1859 --In his speech today at the laying of the foundation stone of the future Metropolitan Tabernacle, Spurgeon declares, "We believe in the 5 great points, commonly known as ‘Calvinistic’. We look upon them as being 5 great lights which radiate from the cross of Christ." At the opening of the Tabernacle in 1861, addresses will be given on Human Depravity, Election, Particular Redemption, Effectual Calling, and the Final Perseverance of believers.